Perceived Importance of Smart and Sustainable Building Features from the Users' Perspective

Smart and sustainable buildings have been designed, built and utilized in order to consume less energy, facilitate efficient building operation, and improve the comfort, health and productivity of users. Hence, they become a critical component of smart cities. Nonetheless, perceived importance rankings of different features of smart and sustainable buildings have yet to be identified and prioritized from the users' perspective. Based on responses from 494 building users in Hong Kong, it was found that building users tended to focus more on intelligent security systems, followed by intelligent and responsive fresh air supply and lifts and escalators. On the other hand, building users generally considered the systems that monitor people's movement and harvest rain water to be the least important features. Exploratory factor analyses were used to identify key factors of perceived smartness and sustainability of a building. The results of factor analyses showed that different user groups would characterize a building's smartness differently.